On Sat, 2011-03-26 at 19:32 +0200, Michael Snoyman wrote:
> Hi all,
>> JP Moresmau recently sent me an email asking for recommendations on
> hosting a Yesod app. I think a number of you have heard me mention the
> idea of setting up a WAI web hosting system (code named Lambda
> Engine). I think it's time to start hitting this idea hard, and I'd
> like community involvement as much as possible.
This is something that I feel would be *very* useful; perhaps even more
useful than the Yesod installer. I am very excited about seeing this
happen.
>> I think we have two extremes we can approach this from: at the one
> end, we can provide a complete hosting solution, similar to Heroku[1].
> People would simply "cabal sdist" their project, type "lambda-engine
> upload mytarball.tar.gz" and their site would be live. Lambda Engine
> would automatically handle database server configuration, DNS setup,
> and so on.
I currently use something similar to the 'vhost' middleware for Wai
(Network.Wai.Middleware.Vhost) and intended to expand it to a more
powerful proxy server; and I like the idea of easily uploading new /
updating current applications.
However, I would probably prefer to upload a binary rather than the
source. None of my servers have any compiler support (for reasons
similar to those stated by Rick Richardson).
I would love to be able to "lambda-engine upload server mysite" (which
would upload "mysite" to a server at "server") and immediately see the
result.
Oh my...
>> At the other extreme, we could simply provide a set of shell scripts
> for setting up a vanilla Ubuntu (or Debian, or Cent, or FreeBSD...)
> install to support compiling a WAI application, provide an nginx
> setup, etc. The user would be responsible- and have the freedom to-
> set up his/her own server however he/she wants.
I would prefer to be able to choose the Linux distro I used, so a set of
shell scripts would have to be reasonably generic. However I feel this
would take a lot of effort to realise. IMO better to be just a program.
>> There are lots of in-between points on that spectrum. For example, I
> was thinking of perhaps providing a central compilation server that
> everyone could use. In my experience, Haskell applications take very
> few resources to run, but actually building the things take a while.
> Compiling on a local system and then uploading is painful because (1)
> you have to deal with architecture issues and (2) you might have a
> slow upload speed.
If these were problems I suffered from, I would be more comfortable if
this service was commercial.
>> Anyway, I'm very interested to hear what other people think about all
> this. I'll enumerate a bunch of random thoughts on this topic:
>> * Should this be a for-profit venture, bankrolled by a few members, or
> a community, non-profit approach? (I'm favoring the latter.)
Perhaps both? For single users the community approach would be
wonderful. For us, we would rather pay for a service that would offer
certain guarantees.
> * If we decide to provide some serious hosting power, we might be able
> to make a deal with a hosting provider, stating that we're
> representing the "entire Haskell web community".
I believe that Rick's point about providing some guarantee of long-term
customers would certainly get some hosts on-board, but I fear that the
guarantee would be hard to make.
> * I don't really think this needs to be WAI specific: assuming we just
> use reverse HTTP proxies, this will work for any app that uses
> standalone hosting. We could also support FastCGI if we wanted.
Useful.
> * Remember that Amazon is now providing a free tier, which provides a
> micro EC2 instance (available as either 32 or 64 bit). I think the
> micro instance should be sufficient for running a few web apps, nginx
> and PostgreSQL.
I'm not sure about that one.
> * Since starting up and shutting down instances is so easy with
> Amazon, we could provide both a "web host" image and a "Haskell
> compiler" image. The web host could automatically start up a compiler
> instance as needed.
Sure.
> * Are we going to provide email sending support, with all of the
> complications of dealing with spam lists, or simply offload to
> external services (like Amazon SES[2])?
Would be very useful.
-----------------
* Load balancing? Install lambda-engine on a number of servers and allow
load-balancing between them cross-roads style (XR)?
* ... and be able to provide custom balancing algorithm in Haskell?!
* Upload binary to one machine and it mirrors it to all?
* How to handle per-application configuration (host, and so on)?
* Daemonized lambda-engine?
I'm very excited about this idea; I would love to be able to ditch
lighttpd/apache in favour of a WAI specific server (with optional
FastCGI support).
- Blake xx
>> Michael
>> [1] http://heroku.com/> [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ses/>> _______________________________________________
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